[Tlhingan-hol] Dante qul'a'

[nIqolay q]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 9:45 AM, Steven Boozer <sboozer at uchicago.edu> wrote:
> nIqolay:
>> A few months ago I tried translating the message above the gate to Hell
>> from Dante's "Inferno", Canto III, keeping the terza rima aba-bcb-cdc
>> rhyme scheme and the eleven-syllable lines. (I didn't preserve the stress
>> patterns, though. chaq jImaw' 'ach jImaw'qu'be'.)
>>
>> tuvengDI' bechtaHghachna' vegh boghoSbej.
>> tuvengDI' reH taHchu'bogh bepDaq boDuv.
>> tuvengDI' chIlchoHbogh rIntaH chaH botlhej.
>>
>> muchenmoHchu'ta'bogh wa''a' tungHa' ruv.
>> jItaHchoHmeH nItebHa' vang Qun woQ'a'
>> Qorghchu'ghach wa'DIch je. vang je Sov'a' quv.
>>
>> taHchu'wI' neH luchenmoHlu' jIchenpa'.
>> not vItaghlu'. not jIDor. reH jItaHchu'.
>> naDev bo'elDI' pejegh 'ej petulHa'.
>
> Since my Dante is rusty I had to look it up:
>
>   "Per me si va ne la città dolente,
>   per me si va ne l'etterno dolore,
>   per me si va tra la perduta gente.
>
>   Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;
>   fecemi la divina podestate,
>   la somma sapïenza e 'l primo amore.
>
>   Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
>   se non etterne, e io etterno duro.
>   Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate."
>
>
>   "Through me the way is to the city dolent;
>   Through me the way is to eternal dole;
>   Through me the way among the people lost.
>
>   Justice incited my sublime Creator;
>   Created me divine Omnipotence,
>   The highest Wisdom and the primal Love.
>
>   Before me there were no created things,
>   Only eterne, and I eternal last.
>   All hope abandon, ye who enter in!"
>
> http://italian.about.com/library/anthology/dante/blinferno003.htm (I don't know how old this translation is.)
>
>> Some notes on word choice:
>> Line 4: I'm not 100% sure if wa''a' is strictly acceptable, but its
>> meaning is clear enough that perhaps it could be excused as poetic
>> license.
>
> Although I'm not sure what you're trying to get across, but Okrand's comments on the common tendency of some people to use *{Qun'a'} for God may be useful here:
>
>   {Qun'a'} "great god" ({Qun} plus {-'a'}, the augmentative
>   suffix) may or may not be an appropriate translation for
>   a single supernatural being in a monotheistic system,
>   since the {Qun'a'} would still be one among many.
>   [startrek.klingon (7/19/1999)]

I was trying to use wa''a' as "important one, great one, special one"
as in "the One who created me". (Apparently the meaning wasn't as
clear as I thought!)

I did use Qun later in Qun woQ'a' to mean "divine authority" since
"divine" can be used to describe both polytheist and monotheist
deities. It could be interpreted as "the authority of a god," as in
"the kind of authority a god would have", and a monotheistic context
would suggest that there was only one such being who has the kind of
authority a god has. I didn't use Qun'a', though, specifically because
Okrand wasn't sure if it worked for a reference to a monotheist deity.

I also briefly thought of ngIq'a' as "important one, great one", since
the original post where ngIq got mentioned described it by saying "I
surmise that {ngIq} by itself could mean 'the one and only'," but it
seems like the literal meaning of ngIq is still not 100% certain. A
simple quvwI' might work, though; it's what I had written down before
I switched to wa''a'.